Employment opportunities for physics graduates (bachelor, master, or Ph.D.) are plentiful. The particular skill set that is necessary to graduate from a physics program is attractive to a diverse set of institutions and organizations. After college, you may find yourself working for a university, national laboratory, or the government. You might find yourself returning to high school as a teacher or, like the majority of physics graduates, enter life in private industry.

Many of you may have a fairly good picture of how life as a physicist would look in academia, since you are attending a college right now. However, only about 10% of graduates follow this career, another 10% go back to high school, but a whopping 80% follow different careers.

So what does it mean “to work in industry” or to “work at a lab”? To answer this question and to introduce you to more alternatives than what you may have thought of so far, the Far West Section of the American Physical Society is organizing a one-day event on July 8, 2017, held at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory. This event will bring students of all levels together with professionals from academia, national laboratories, and industry.

The program will consist of presentations as well as informal networking opportunities, e.g. dinner with a view. We will also offer a tour of the lab and show you the world’s first x-ray laser (LCLS). We will visit the Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Laboratory (SSRL) as well.

We hope that this will be an informative day for everyone involved and it should be plenty of fun. The event is free, but we would like to ask you to fill out the registration information so that we know how many people will attend.

By the way, in case you found this page without being a member of APS, now is the time to join. Membership is free for students in the first year. Don’t forget to also join the Far West Section — which is free as well — when you sign up.